


Loop

by savant (teii)



Category: Deadpool (Comics), Marvel (Comics)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-19
Updated: 2015-08-19
Packaged: 2018-04-15 13:03:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4607790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teii/pseuds/savant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s in love.</p><p>He must be, to keep doing this, just for Pete. At least, that’s what he tells himself. But he scrubs his face, and stands up, walking into the Light.</p><p>He’s in love, he’s in love, he’s in love, he keeps reminding himself.</p><p>He’ll always be in love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Loop

**Author's Note:**

> Please note that there is an Archive Warning that I am purposefully not adding to preserve the ending. Please proceed with caution.

He’s in love.

He must be, to keep doing this, just for Pete. At least, that’s what he tells himself. But he scrubs his face, and stands up, walking into the Light.

He’s in love, he’s in love, he’s in love, he keeps reminding himself.

He’ll always be in love.

\--

His Pete’s gone.

Don’t look at him like that, he couldn’t stop it, and now, he can’t fix it. He tried, god damn him, he’s tried.

But Pete is gone now, cold and wet, to somewhere where he can not follow, Death keeps him at bay, smug, relentless. Taunting. 

_You can not have him,_ she reminds him.

 _Keep him_ , he says in return, _I’ll find another_.

\--

He’s nowhere to be seen here either. It’s not an exact route, this zig-zagging Wade is doing, with the numbers all jumbled together and the trajectory not quite right, and it all blurs into one long trip to him-- of trains and buses and cars and planes and the Light. Always on the move, always somewhere else to head, now that that particular trail’s gone cold, the road blocked.

The Light, there at every stop, there at every port. In time, inevitably, he will take the Light to someplace new.

\--

It is this Hope. This damnable, sticky, relentless thing. Peter always said it was worth having, worth cradling, worth looking after.

Wade wants nothing more than to see it crushed, the embers flicker off into nothing, but it glows, burning in his ribcage, and he can’t claw it out.

(He tried, with a scalpel, with a butcher knife, with anything on hand. He’s tried many, many times.)

It turns him into a puppet, moving him from place to place, thinking he has a chance of finding Pete, eventually. _You have the time_ , it says. _You have all the time in the world_.

And then some.

\--

He can’t remember his face.

It dawns on Wade one day, that he doesn’t remember what Pete’s face looks like. It seizes him up in a panic-- if he can’t remember what he looked like, then what if he accidentally passed him by, that he was there, and he was every bit of an idiot not to recognize him.

So he sits down and tries to sift out the memories, distinctly separating them into ‘Pete’ and ‘Without-Pete’. He thinks he remembers his laugh (thought it might not be his), his hair, his knees, his wrists (though none of them might be real), and the details are all muddy, the fragments of details meshed together to form a ghost of an idea.

He does, however see this: their kitchen, mid-morning, Pete at the breakfast nook, mug in hand, the light dappling across his arms. The smell of coffee and hair gel is in the air. He’s in one of Wade’s giant t-shirts and he’s happy.

At least, Wade liked to think he was.

Hope, yet again, pulls him up and into the Light.

 _Soon_ , it says, _soon you will find him_.

\--

There are no Spider-men here. And in this one, New York doesn’t even exist. It doesn’t deter Wade though, who has a system down pat almost. Start with the closest approximation of New York, and move down along the coast, then across the country, then into Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras on down, flying out from Bueno Aires and starting the search up again in Johannesburg. At times, he think it might be easier, traveling by Light, to hit the big cities only, but it doesn’t let him scour the small towns, the ones that seem all the same that it’s hard to keep track of them.

The numbers are against him, but he still, he looks.

There's nothing else left for him to do.

\--

He’s back.

At first, he doesn’t believe it, but he is. There, in front of Pete’s tombstone, the fleur-de-lis and the smooth granite taunting him.

He’s made a loop. He’s made a goddamn loop.

He’s down on his knees, into the dirt. He’s so, so tired, and he has nothing to show for it. He’s failed, in every way.

But to stay is to admit defeat, to stay is to say that Pete is here and dead and nowhere else.

That this is where Pete is, this is where he’s always been, and where he will always be, cold and wet. Time blinked in, and blinked out, and that’s all of Peter Parker he will ever get to experience.

Infinite worlds theoretically means infinite Petes. It also means infinite worlds without Petes. It means there might be a chance that he’s been quite unlucky to keep finding worlds without Pete. A row, a page, a book, a library of all Zeros, and not a single One.

 _You haven’t been trying hard enough_ , Hope adamantly says, _he’s still out there, waiting for you_.

_Don’t you want to see him?_

He etches a mark into the granite, for posterity’s sake, before looking up, and heading towards the Light once more.

He has a feeling he’ll be back.

\--

He’s in love.

He must be, to keep doing this, just for Pete. At least, that’s what he tells himself. But he looks around, at “New York” or wherever he’s at now, ignoring him, going about their day.

He’s in love, he’s in love, he’s in love, he keeps reminding himself.

He’ll always be in love.

**Author's Note:**

> This was a little more experimental than usual for me, so thank you so much for reading to the end. :)


End file.
